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What Happens to Most of Your Debts in Chapter 7 “Straight Bankruptcy”?

Your debts that are not secured by collateral and are not “priority” debts are discharged (written off) and paid nothing. Mostly.

 

In my blog post last week I introduced the three main categories of debts: “secured,” “priority,” and “general unsecured.”

Secured and priority debts tend to be the ones with issues worth talking about. Secured debts often have liens against your important property and possessions—your home, your car or your truck, maybe your furniture and appliances. Priority debts are ones that are usually not secured but are favored in various ways in the law. They include child and spousal support, certain taxes, and such.

It’s worth paying a lot of attention to secured and priority debts because they raise questions that are likely important to you. Such as, how does bankruptcy help you keep your car if you are behind on payments? If you file a Chapter 7 case do you have to keep paying on your furniture loan to keep your bedroom furniture, and if so how much? How can filing bankruptcy enable you to get and/or keep current on your child support? Will you be able to write off any of your overdue income taxes?

We will look into these questions and more about secured and priority debts in upcoming blog posts. And yet, you probably have more of the third category of debts, “general unsecured” ones, than either secured or priority debts. So first let’s look at what happens to your general unsecured debts, covering today what happens if you file a Chapter 7, and then in my next blog post what happens under Chapter 13.

General Unsecured Debts  

First a reminder from last week: general unsecured debts are those that don’t belong in the other two categories. They are unsecured in that they have no lien on any of your property or possessions. They are “general” simply in that they are not one of special “priority” debts that the law has selected for special favored treatment.

General unsecured debts include all sorts of obligations. Besides the most common ones like (most) credit cards and medical bills, they include personal loans without collateral, checking accounts with a negative balance, bounced checks, most payday loans, claims against you for property damage and personal injury, for breaches of contract—again, just about any way that you can owe money without collateral.

What Happens to Most General Unsecured Debts in Most Chapter 7 Cases

All these kinds of general unsecured debts are usually just legally, permanently written off—“discharged”—in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy case. That means that once they are discharged—usually about 3 months after your case is filed—the creditors can take absolutely no steps to collect those debts.

The only way those debts are paid anything is if either 1) the debt is NOT dischargeable or 2) it is paid (in part or in full) through an asset distribution in your Chapter 7 case.

 1) “Dischargeability”

A creditor can dispute your ability to get a discharge of your debt. Very few general unsecured debts are challenged and so they get discharged. In the rare case that the discharge of one of your debts is challenged, you may have to pay some or all of that particular debt. That depends on whether the creditor is able to establish that the facts fit within some quite narrow grounds. That would usually involving allegations of fraud, misrepresentation or other similar bad behavior on your part. If the creditor fails to establish the necessary grounds, the debt is discharged.

There are also some general unsecured debts that are not discharged unless you convince the court that they should be, such as student loans. The grounds for discharging student loans are quite difficult to establish.

2) Asset Distribution

If everything you own is exempt, or protected, then your Chapter 7 trustee will not take any of your assets from you. This is what usually happens—you’ll hear it referred to as a “no asset” case. But if the trustee DOES take possession of any of your assets for distribution to your creditors—an “asset case”— your “general unsecured creditors” may, but often don’t receive some of it. The trustee must first pay off any of your priority debts, as well as pay the trustee’s own fees and costs. The unsecured creditors get a pro rata share of the pool of whatever, if anything is left over.

Conclusion

In most Chapter 7 cases your general unsecured debts will all be discharged and most of the time will receive nothing from you. Rarely, a creditor may challenge the discharge of its debt. And if, again rarely, you have an “asset case,” the trustee may pay a part or—extremely rarely—all of the general unsecured debts, but only after paying all priority debts and his or her fees and costs.  

 

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If You Owe Lots of Business Debt You Can Maybe Skip the “Means Test” and Qualify for Chapter 7

One benefit of owing more business debt than consumer debt is that it gives you a largely free pass into a Chapter 7 bankruptcy case. 

 

The Role of the “Means Test”

If your income is too high, you have to pass a “means test” to discharge—legally write off—your debts through a Chapter 7 “straight bankruptcy.” The point of this test is to prevent you from discharging your debts if you have the “means” to pay a meaningful portion of them. So it’s essentially an income and expenses test.

If you don’t pass the “means test,” you could be found to be under a “presumption of abuse” of the bankruptcy laws. If so, you would not be allowed to continue with your Chapter 7 case.  

One way to get out of the “means test” is by having less income than the permitted “median family income” for your state and family size. Most people who file under Chapter 7 have low enough income to avoid the “means test.” But the “median family income” amounts are quite low. If your income is above permitted amount, you have to go through the “means test.” As a result you may be forced into a lengthy and relatively expensive 3-to-5-year Chapter 13 payment plan instead of a usually-less-than-four-month Chapter 7 case.

If You Owe More Non-Consumer Debts than Consumer Debts

Because the “means test” was intended for consumer bankruptcies not business ones, it only applies to consumer cases. What’s critical is how the law distinguishes between the two.

You can avoid taking the “means test” altogether—including the “median family income” step—if your debts are not “primarily consumer debts.” That’s the standard. If your debts are not “primarily consumer debts,” you would be eligible for a Chapter 7 case regardless of your income, even if it’s above the “median” amount.

In fact if you don’t have “primarily consumer debts,” you avoid other kinds of “presumptions of abuse” as well. You can avoid not just the income-and-expense “means test,” but also other ways that your Chapter 7 case could be challenged in a consumer case. Congress has apparently decided that if your debts are mostly from a failed business, you should be permitted an immediate Chapter 7 “fresh start” without the precautions in the law supposedly designed to prevent abuse of the bankruptcy laws by consumers.

What’s “Consumer Debt”?

To determine whether you can avoid the “means test,” we need to be clear what a “consumer debt” is. The Bankruptcy Code defines a “consumer debt” as one “incurred by an individual primarily for a personal, family, or household purpose.” (Emphasis added.)

The focus is on the purpose for which you initially incurred the debt, even if the debt would otherwise seem like a consumer debt. Small business owners often finance their business’s start-up and ongoing operation with their consumer credit—credit cards, home equity lines of credit and such. Given their purpose, these might qualify as non-consumer debts in calculating whether you have “primarily consumer debts.” This is definitely something to discuss with your attorney to learn how the local bankruptcy judges are interpreting this issue.

 What Does “Primarily Consumer Debts” Mean?

If the total amount of your “consumer debt” is less than the total amount of your debts that are not “consumer debts,” then your debts are not “primarily consumer debts.”

So you have to decide (with the help of your attorney) separately for each one of your debts whether it is a “consumer debt” or not. Then you add up the two columns of debts, and if the total for those that are not “consumer debts” is larger than the total for those that are “consumer debts,” then you do not owe “primarily consumer debts.” And you can skip the “means test.”

Some Business Debts May Be Larger Than You Think

Even after looking closely to see if some of your seemingly “consumer debts” may have actually had a business purpose, you may still believe that you have more of the “consumer debts.” But sometimes business owners have business debts that end up being larger than they thought they were. That could push their not-“consumer debt” higher than their “consumer debt.”

For example, if you had to break a commercial lease for your business premises when you closed your business, the unpaid lease payments projected out over the intended term of the broken lease could be huge. Same thing with a business equipment lease.

Or closing your business may have left you with other hidden or unexpected debts, such as obligations to business partners or unresolved litigation, with potentially large damages owed (and to be discharged in bankruptcy).

Conclusion

The potential good news about such larger-than-expected business debts is that they may result in your non-“consumer debts” outweighing your “consumer debts.” That would enable you to skip the “means test” and avoid other “presumptions for abuse.” That would allow you to discharge all your debts through a Chapter 7 case instead of being forced to pay all you could afford to pay of those debts under a lengthy Chapter 13 case.

 

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If You File a Chapter 7 Bankruptcy with an Attorney You are Nearly Ten Times More Likely to Reach Your Goal of Writing Off Your Debts

Here’s some hard evidence on why it’s dangerous to file bankruptcy without an attorney.

 

As a bankruptcy attorney, I get many phone calls from people who have tried to file a bankruptcy by themselves and have gotten into trouble, sometimes serious trouble. I also run into similar horror stories about what happens when people file without an attorney when I attend “meetings of creditors”—the usually straightforward, usually short meeting with the bankruptcy trustee that everyone filing bankruptcy must attend. I’ve run into countless example of how dangerous it is to file bankruptcy without an attorney.

But I HAVE wondered whether anybody has actually investigated this question. Now somebody has, and we have some pretty solid evidence to back up what I have been witnessing anecdotally.

“The Do-It-Yourself Mirage: Complexity in the Bankruptcy System”

That is the title to a chapter in a book about bankruptcy called Broke: How Debt Bankrupts the Middle Class. This book is a series of articles about many important current issues in the field, with this one chapter focusing on cases filed by debtors not represented by attorneys (“pro se” filers).

The author of this chapter, Asst. Professor Angela K. Littwin of the University of Texas School of Law, analyzed data from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, “the leading [ongoing] national study of consumer bankruptcy for nearly 30 years.” Her finding: “pro se filers were significantly more likely to have their cases dismissed than their represented counterparts.”

Very interestingly, she also learned from the data that

consumers with more education were significantly more likely than others to try filing for bankruptcy on their own, but that their education didn’t appear to help them navigate the process. Pro se debtors with college degrees fared no better than those who had never set foot inside a college classroom.

She concluded that after bankruptcy law was significantly amended back in 2005 in an effort to discourage as many people from filing, “bankruptcy has become so complex that even the most potentially sophisticated consumers are unable to file correctly.”

Ten Times More Likely to Get a Discharge of Your Debts

In a closely related study, Prof. Littwin stated that “17.6 percent of unrepresented [Chapter 7 “straight bankruptcy”] debtors had their cases dismissed or converted” into 3-to-5-year Chapter 13 “adjustment of debts” cases.  “In contrast, only 1.9 percent of debtors with lawyers met this fate.”  Even after controlling for other factors such as “education, race and ethnicity, income, age, homeownership, prior bankruptcy, whether the debtor had any nonminimal unencumbered assets at the time of the filing,” “represented debtors were almost ten times more likely to receive a discharge than their pro se counterparts.”

Prof. Littwin concluded that “filing pro se dramatically escalates the chance that a Chapter 7 bankruptcy will not provide a person with debt relief.”

 

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Taking the “Means Test” All the Way to Its End

If your income is higher than the median and you have too much disposable income, you’ll need “special circumstances” to do a Chapter 7.

  

The “Presumption of Abuse”

The means test determines whether you qualify to file a Chapter 7 “straight bankruptcy” case—or whether instead you have too much “means” to do so. If you don’t pass the means test, your case is said to be presumed to be an abuse of Chapter 7. That’s just another way of saying you are not legally appropriate for this type of bankruptcy relief. Then you can’t proceed with your Chapter 7 bankruptcy case, and your case will either be dismissed (thrown out) or more likely converted into a Chapter 13 “adjustment of debts” type of bankruptcy instead.

There are a number of levels to this test. Once you pass it at any of the levels, you don’t have to go any further. My last few blog posts explored the earlier levels; today is about the final level. You only get here if you haven’t passed the means test on any of the earlier levels.

The Earlier Levels of the Means Test

You can avoid this presumption of abuse IF ANY of the following apply to you:

First, your income is no more than the median family income for your state and your size of family. See this website for the current median income amounts. Caution: “income” has a very specific and unusual definition for means test purposes. See my recent blog posts for more about this.

Second, if your income is more than the applicable median family income amount but, after subtracting a list of allowable expenses, your remaining monthly disposable income is less than about $125 per month, then you pass the means test.

Third, if your income is more than the applicable median family income amount, AND your remaining monthly disposable income after the allowable expenses is more than about $125 per month but no more than about $208 per month, then you may be able to still pass the means test. But that’s only if, when you multiply your monthly disposable income amount by 60, that total is less than 25% of your “non-priority unsecured debts” (debts not secured by collateral, excluding special “priority debts”—certain taxes, support payments, and such).

It’s somewhat rare that a person who needs and wants to file a Chapter 7 case would not have passed the means test through one of the above levels. A large percentage of people pass on the first level by simply having low enough income. Others pass at the second level because their income is low enough compared to their expenses. And others pass because the amount of their disposable income after expenses is low enough compared to the amount of their debt.

The Last Level

BUT, if after all this you haven’t passed the means test that your case is still under a presumption of abuse, you still have one more last chance, one last level of the means test to pass. You can show “special circumstances.” The Bankruptcy Code lays out this out as follows:

[T]he presumption of abuse may… be rebutted by demonstrating special circumstances, such as a serious medical condition or a call or order to active duty in the Armed Forces, to the extent such special circumstances… justify additional expenses or adjustments of current monthly income for which there is no reasonable alternative.

Congress did not make clear what counts for “special circumstances” beyond the two examples provided.

The Means Test Ends Up Being Not So “Objective”

So when pushed to the last level, a test that was intended to be an objective way to decide who qualifies to file a Chapter 7 bankruptcy comes down to a very subjective question about whether any “special circumstances” apply. Talk to your attorney about how this phrase is being interpreted in your local bankruptcy court.

 

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